Why am I not showing up in ChatGPT?

The better question is: why doesn't AI trust my brand enough to recommend it?

It’s a subtle but important shift. Importantly, it moves the conversation away from trying to optimise for a single platform and towards understanding how AI is forming confidence in brands. The answer lies in the digital evidence your business leaves across the web.

Across the brands we work with (and all the existing research and stats out there), Google continues to drive the overwhelming majority of organic traffic and revenue, and we expect that to remain true for some time. However, platforms such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini (and Google AI Overviews & AI Mode) are changing how people discover, compare and evaluate brands. They have fast become a critical part of the decision-making journey.

Unlike a traditional search engine returning a list of pages, AI is trying to answer a niche question with confidence. To do that, it looks beyond what a brand says about itself. It searches for evidence that supports those claims and validates them through other trusted sources. Reviews, media coverage, comparison sites, directories, expert commentary, customer conversations and public sentiment all contribute to how a brand is understood. Visibility is important, but visibility without validation rarely builds trust.

Only a small proportion of the sources AI references come directly from a brand's own website. In our research, brand websites appear in only approx 10% of total relevant citations (on average). The vast majority of the evidence comes from elsewhere. AI is not forming an answer from a single source. It is building confidence by connecting signals from across the web and looking for consistency between them.

Search visibility (which combines both SEO & AEO) can no longer be treated as a siloed channel that sits next to PR, content, brand, social media or customer care. Every one of these activities contributes to how your business is seen, understood, validated and ultimately recommended. They are all creating connected signals that help establish confidence in your brand. SEO/AEO strategies must be woven into every digital customer experience of the brand.

This represents a broader shift in how organisations should think about digital marketing. For years, success was often measured by how effectively a website could perform in search results. We are now seeing 93% of Google Searches end without a click when in AI Mode. Increasingly, success will depend on whether your entire digital presence tells a consistent, credible and compelling story. Your website remains incredibly important, but it is now one part of a much larger network of information that AI uses to verify who you are, what you do and whether you are worthy of recommendation.

The brands that perform best in this new environment will not necessarily be those producing the most content or chasing every new AI platform. They will be the brands whose integrated marketing creates consistent, connected signals wherever customers (and increasingly AI) encounter them.

Search Engines and websites are still critically important, but AI is changing how confidence is built and recommendations are made. As that shift continues, brands will need to think less about individual channels and more about the connected signals they create across every digital experience.

Brands need to be intentional about what they want to be known for. The next step is understanding whether the broader web tells that same story, and where gaps in content or digital presence are limiting AI's confidence in recommending them.